Eighteen of the original twenty-three mounds remain in this earthwork complex, one of the largest and best preserved of its era in the eastern United States. Located on a natural levee along a bayou that once connected Deer Creek with the Mississippi River, the mounds, ramps, causeway s, and plazas all appear to have been built in a short period after Winterville’s original Coles Creek people, who occupied the site as early as 1000, began to interact through trade and possibly immigration with the Mississippian culture from the north. Primarily a ceremonial site, rather than a settled village, it suffered a conflagration around 1400 and ceded its prominence to a new ceremonial complex to the south at Lake George near what is now Holly Bluff, Mississippi.
At fifty-five feet in height with two ramps leading up to it, Mound A dominates the site and is the focal point of two built-up plazas surrounded by a ring of smaller “boundary mounds,” some of which are connected to each other by causeways. The monumental structures at Winterville indicate a complex society able to mobilize and organize large groups of workers to complete complicated civil engineering projects. Once a site was chosen—often designed to be viewed from a waterway—workers cleared it of foliage and leveled it, which itself involved bringing in great amounts of soil. As here, earthworks were built with alternating layers of soil and silt, dug from the banks of nearby creeks and transported to the site in baskets by perhaps hundreds of workers. A ring of soil would be laid down and then filled in and compressed, and another layer would begin.
Early American settlers described the overgrown site, sparking the interest of archaeologists, who have conducted numerous investigations over the last century. In 1939, the Greenville Garden Club saved Winterville from agricultural degradation by acquiring forty-one acres. Winterville, designated a National Historic Landmark in 1993, became a Mississippi Department of Archives and History site in 2000.